A few weeks after Ticketmaster announced that it was offering a new fraud-eliminating encrypted ticketing service across the NFL, the company is expanding that new service with plans to next enter Major League Soccer via Los Angeles FC.
The ticketing company struck a deal with the NFL in 2017 to build a fully digital league-wide ticketing system that will have all 32 teams operating exclusively as mobile venues for the 2019 season. Stemming from that partnership, Ticketmaster announced a new encrypted offering in May called SafeTix.
With that system, Ticketmaster creates tickets with barcodes that change every 15 seconds, rendering the previous versions unusable. The idea is to ensure fans are holding legitimate tickets that can’t be copied and blasted out by a counterfeiter to multiple victims simultaneously.
By refreshing four times per minute, the NFL is able to prevent tickets from being captured with a screenshot and shared through improper channels. Fans can also enter a stadium seamlessly with a quick “tap and go” of their smartphones by using the same NFC technology that powers Apple Pay.
Ticketmaster previously announced that SafeTix will be used across NFL stadiums for the 2019 season. At Horizon Summit, a sports tech and analytics conference being hosted this week by SportTechie and the San Francisco 49ers at Levi’s Stadium, the company announced that LAFC will adopt the technology next.
Outside of fraud prevention, a primary motivator for using such technology is to give operators (the NFL, its 32 teams, and now LAFC), the ability to learn who exactly is entering arenas on game days.
“Identity is everything,” said Justin Burleigh, Ticketmaster’s chief product officer. “For 40 years in this industry, we have communicated with fans in exactly the same way: we shouted at them. ‘Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! We’ve got a bunch of tickets, come by.’ We will not move to that next evolution of identity if we don’t change that paradigm.”
Ticketmaster offers its Presence smart fan platform to help clients run analytics to better cater products, services, and promotions to specific individuals.
When Ticketmaster first set out to digitize ticketing, the company found that as few as one fifth of event attendees were actually known to the organizers. From the primary point of sale, tickets were changing hands an average of three times, reaching higher than five times on occasion.
“So literally at points in your interaction with your fans, there are Kevin Bacon degrees of separation between you and your fan,” Burleigh said.
That was leaving teams with little information about who was entering their facilities on game days, and fostering a thriving counterfeit market in which five million fraudulent tickets were sold each year.
Through the implementation of digital and mobile ticketing last season with the NFL, Ticketmaster said teams have started to vastly increase knowledge about their fan bases and operations. Mobile entry helped the NFL learn the names of two million previously unknown fans last season. In the first year of Ticketmaster’s digital partnerships with the NFL, 50 percent of the new names collected came from secondary markets.
Calling Safetix a “watershed moment for the industry,” Burleigh said the service will “take fraud to zero.”
“It closes the loop of identity,” he said. “You can still sell it, but now you have to transfer that from one human being to another human being. When that happens, you pick up fidelity of identity. And once that happens, you can do some really interesting things from an operational perspective.”
Additionally to the NFL and LAFC, Ticketmaster also announced last month a digital ticketing partnership with U.S. Soccer. As part of that deal, which is separate from LAFC, Ticketmaster will help U.S. Soccer adopt mobile ticketing and leverage fan biometrics for entry to U.S. Men’s and Women’s National Team games. Also on Thursday, the company announced a partnership with the Montreal Canadiens.